And I Shall Make You a Weapon
by Eveylin
Summary: And somewhere else it was completely different and exactly the same. There were two boys, a shed, and thirty years in captivity. The rest is mere details. AU. A way The World Is Changing never happened.


**Disclaimer: **The Pretender is property of someone not I. No infringement intended. **  
**

**And I Shall Make You A Weapon**

_And somewhere else it was completely different and exactly the same. There were two boys, a shed, and thirty years in captivity. The rest is mere details. AU. A way The World is Changing never happened. Jarod/Lyle, slash._

_Happy birthday, Jacci._

_

* * *

_

"All the bridges are burning that we might have crossed." – Leonard Cohen.

There is a moment of near dizzying happiness when Lyle's fingernails break and blood wells on the wall, staining grey to red. There is a colour, he thinks wildly, under the grey there is a colour and it is red. He watches it dry: the slow process of bright red turning to deep crimson to near black and nearly brown where it's thin. Haemoglobin, he thinks, platelets and oxygenation. He imagines himself as a single blood vessel travelling his body and names all the aortas he would trace before finally dripping from the cuts in his fingertips. The fingertips themselves are stiff, almost unfamiliar from the developing scabs. They could almost be someone else's, another person's hands and body. Someone else, he thinks desperately, someone else not here.

The blood dries on the grey walls and Lyle doesn't think about the passage of time. He doesn't count the days – there is nothing to count down to, precious little to count from.

There are no air vents, no way out, and for once Lyle doesn't have an answer.

---

_Who are you?_

_My name's Lyle. I'm here to help you._

_--- _

There are no cameras in his room. He cannot be sure. Maybe there are hundreds – little bugs and microphones recording his every breath – but Lyle cannot find them. The paint is smooth and flawless, the concrete floor the same. The bed offers nothing, nor the linen or the mattress. You've been wrong before, he reminds himself, and then dismisses the thought as too painful.

"No one knows you're down here," Jarod whispers to him, as if he knows his thoughts. "And no one will until you give me what I want."

Lyle stares at the blank, grey walls. How long has it been since they caught him? How long has it been since Jarod last visited? He tries to feel anything but relief from the monotony – to summon the outrage that once burnt so brightly.

_(Please, please don't leave me here again.)_

A whisper. "What do you want, Lyle?"

_(oh please, please) _

He can't – he can't answer that, not with simple words. _(kill you, hate you, let me out-out-out, don't leave)_ Eyes slip close and he's Marilyn fucking Monroe lining up sleeping pills so neatly; he's JFK never even seeing the gun, and it doesn't matter he only ever watched them die because they're not _here _in this kingdom of nothingness.

_(please)_

Lyle's spent his entire life watched but here there are no cameras. There isn't of his life that isn't on record. First with DSAs and, later, by newspapers and people. Now no one watches, no one's there, no one cares. There's not a single thing to say he exists except the feel of his own body and Jarod's visits. He's all alone --

(A thumb tracing his nape, "I can give you all you want.")

-- except.

---

_I can save him, Sydney, I can save him._

_--- _

In the first hours of his capture Lyle imagined torture – flashing lights, sleep deprivation and needles under fingernails. He imagined brainwashing and Sydney telling him "just help us, Lyle, please." Those things he thinks he could stand. He could visit places in his mind to escape the pain.

He never imagined this – this boredom and monotony and endless, lonely grey. Grey until it's all he knows and all he sees. Grey until he forgets there are other colours at all and he has to look at his own bloody fingerprints on the wall to assure himself. He wishes Jarod would visit, so he could kill him, or just to have someone to talk to.

There's nothing to do but think. (Not about that.) He uses three different methods to work out the hundredth digit of pi but it only lasts an hour and he knew it anyway.

His mind drifts, as it always has. He wonders if the boy's safe, if he got away with his father. He wonders what Major Parker is like, how the boy is fairing in the free world, and if he has a name other than Gemini.

("Their plane was shot down."

"You're lying!"

"Maybe, but you'll never know."

_Don't think about that._)

The walls are too close and too far away. He wants to touch them to assure himself they're real, that all of this is real, but can't bear to because then he'll know that it _is. _

("She died on the asphalt."

"Liar."

"You're right; she died on the table when they tried to remove the bullet from her back."

"_Liar._"

"You'll have to earn the truth, Lyle."

_Don't think about that either._)

A nutritionally perfect meal slides under the flap but he doesn't touch it, just so he can feel the hunger. It's a feeling, something they can't take away. Instead, he breaks each dish down to its components – spinach, lentils, asparagus. And even further – vegetable: relies on nitrates and photosynthesis.

He thinks of the nitrogen cycle – follows through its conversion until it starts to decompose. He thinks of Emily, who may be in the ground already, becoming part of the cycle. Aerobic and anaerobic bacteria breaking her down in ammonification, a process only slowed by the embalming– no, don't think that at all. Jarod _lied_, Emily was alive on the asphalt when he left her, when he jumped on the motorbike and tried to escape. She's his huntress, practically a force of nature. What was it he once said? The only things left after a nuclear apocalypse would be cockroaches and a woman named Emily.

_Cree craw toad's foot _he sings to himself until his voice cracks. He rubs his hands up and down his arms, but it's not cold in his room – cell – and feels nothing like a mother's touch.

---

_Since I got out I've spent every moment searching for my past._

_--- _

"I was taken from my family. They stole me; I'm not sure how old I was. They kept me locked up for thirty years before I managed to escape, and then they spent 3 years trying to catch me. Even sent someone I'd known when I was growing up here. But I was – am – smarter than them, and I managed to get away."

They're listening. He knows.

They have to be.

"I had just found my father when we discovered what the Centre had done. They made a clone of me - not content with one of me to enslave they created another. Told him _I_ had killed his parents. I had to tell him he wasn't… that he was a _copy, _never even intended to be his own person.

"I had _just _found my father when they took him again. And then Emily and Bridgette screwed everything up by arriving at the airstrip and Emily was shot trying to save Mr Charles.

"I don't even know if they're alive, if Jarod was lying and only one survived. If she's alive…"

There's no reply, and after a minute, Lyle wonders if he spoke at all.

---

_Why did you save my life?  
_

_Because I still remember the little girl who gave me my first kiss._

_--- _

Before people had science and knew the Earth wasn't the centre of the universe they called it melancholia. They renamed it with the advent of new sciences, in the 1900s, and called it neurasthenia. Now it survives as a nervous breakdown: "snapping" under immense pressure, mental collapse or mental and physical exhaustion.

This, Lyle decides, is what Jarod wants from him. He's already killed Lyle once, but stopping his heart in the cold of that machine apparently wasn't enough.

Jarod doesn't like things whole, perhaps because he isn't. Trapped in his father's shed – no, pity not the monster. Remember what he did to Che Ling and the ones that may have come before her, the ones who will come after.

Remember what he's doing to _you_.

Lyle's been a psychiatrist – listened to people, watched them for signs and helped them be treated. One raised him, for God's sake.

There is careful precision in the way he crushes his food and smears it on the walls. The words he writes are in a variety of languages, some he knows Jarod will be able to read, some he will have to look up. He methodically shreds his bedding, rips apart the frame and afterwards his hands ache and smell rusty, but he doesn't care. With part of the frame he starts on the concrete walls, first calmly scraping before progressing to hammering and screaming.

His voice echoes and echoes. Somewhere in-between one word and another, the words stop being deliberate, start escaping without his permission.

_Let me out! _becomes _please _becomes _oh God I'll do anything. _

"Anything!" he yells.

_(Except – no, not except.)_

"Anything you want, Jarod."

---

_I want to know who I am. And I'd rather die trying to find out than live not knowing._

_--- _

He doesn't pretend anymore, just imagines. In his mind he's outside in the sun, the rain, even in the water. Maybe he does pretend – it's getting hard to tell. A mother tending to her children – "I can't believe he told you I was dead," she whispers into their hair – and another lying on a beach, raising her glass in a toast to his name.

The food on the wall decomposes just like Emily isn't, but all he can smell is the ocean and the fresh breeze. All he can feel is the salt spray clinging to his skin, instead of the grubby Centre clothing.

Eventually he wakes. He huddles in the remains of his bed and shredded sheets and waits. There's nothing else to do. He waits for Jarod to come.

---

_I can be anything I want to be…_

_--- _

He breaks in Jarod's arms, crying into the white of Jarod's jacket with Jarod's words still echoing in his head.

_If you want to hear about mommy and daddy, you've just got to trust me. _

He doesn't. He doesn't at all because Jarod _caught him _and stuck him in this lifeless cell without air or windows or people. Jarod's slowly killing him--

(His hands, touching him. Oh, God, _touching _him. "You and I are here. Anything you need. All you have to do is _ask._")

-- except.

---

…_I can be a doctor; I can be a fireman…_

_--- _

He wants, oh God he wants. No, he _needs. _He needs so many things: to be free, sunshine, fresh air, touch, ice cream, Jarod, anything but these walls.

"You going to help us, Lyle?"

Anything, he wants to say. I'll do anything for something, anything, as long as it's not _here. _

"Why can't you just admit you liked the simulations?"

Lyle's voice is cracked and broken, harsh on his own ears. He doesn't mean to say anything, but it's been so long since he even _talked _to someone real, much less felt anger. "I didn't enjoy them."

"Oh but you did. You liked the work." He's taunting, goading him into a reaction, but Lyle doesn't care.

He should say _maybe you like killing people _but he doesn't, maybe just so he won't hear the _yes_ in reply. "People died." His voice cracks on the last word.

Almost sadness, or maybe just resignation. "And if you'd never left the Centre you never would have known."

Jarod has a hand on his arm, touching him through the fabric of the Centre-wear shirt he gave Lyle himself. His touch is nothing like a mother's; his hold is firm and without love, without care, but still there.

"No…"

He wants to kill Jarod. To hurt him and make him bleed in a million different ways so they're both bleeding the same--

(His touch, firm and real and not imagined. Not half-felt through another person's imagined life. "Yes.")

--except…

He's not sure he wants to know they bleed the same.

---

…_but I don't know who I am, Sydney._

_--- _

He's broken. A hundred thousand pieces that if put together might make the empty shell of a person. Or they might not; there's no way to tell.

_Broken; adjective_

_Physically and forcibly separated into pieces or cracked or split; or legally or emotionally destroyed_

Jarod will put the pieces together and won't care if they don't fit. He'll push, break, and carve the pieces until they're what he wants.

"I… I want…"

Jarod runs his thumb across Lyle's bottom lip and it's been so long in this goddamned place that he can't _help _but lean into it, even though he's not sure this is what he's asked for. "I'll get you something to do," Jarod promises, now stroking his cheek. "A new room." He doesn't glance around, ignores the words spread across the walls.

Quieter: "I _need_…"

And Jarod leans in and kisses him, hard. Everything starts coming together with Jarod's tongue in his mouth and his hands on Lyle's body, _touching_. Jarod's mouth is warm and wet, tasting like ice cream and the outside world. Lyle thinks, for just one second, that maybe he could live without sunlight if he had this instead.

---

"_This might sound hard to believe, but I've never…"_

_--- _

He's in his new room when he wakes up. It's the same as the old, except there's a desk with three files on top instead of words scripted in asparagus. The desk is steel, bolted to the floor through the legs. Lyle wastes time examining it, trying to lift it and marvelling at the strain on his already slightly sore muscles.

The files are huge, each one marked with a date. Lyle's not sure if one is today's, but that doesn't matter at all, not _finally_ with something to do.

The numbers dance for him in his mind's eye. Not challenging – this wouldn't have been challenging when he was seven – but still something to do. A delicate balancing game of formulas where everything is dependant on a tiny decimal point. He calculates and mixes metaphors in his mind for hours before he realises with excitement the reason he was given these files: there's money missing.

He traces peculiarities and errors through page after page, file after file. It's a numerical car chase and they lead him right back to their hideout.

At the end his hand aches from holding his pen too tightly, there is ink on his fingers, and he feels _alive. _

"Mr Alex Vandeguard," he says with a flourish.

Jarod smiles.

"_Very_ good, Lyle," Jarod says.

---

_Think hell, with nicer furniture._

_--- _

There is a routine now. A method (hypothesis, experiment, evidence, thesis, conclusion, Lyle thinks) to his days and even some of his nights. Today is different though: the file on his desk is thinner, and when he flicks it open there are no Centre expense reports. Instead, pages of someone's life: credit card spending, phone records, schedule. Beneath it a slim laptop with a sticky note attached.

_We need to find this man._

_J. _

The first page says this man is a killer by way of introduction - a horrible man who has tortured children and is on the run from the authorities after they tried finally to bring him to justice. Lyle reads it all and marvels at the blatancy of their lies. And they are lies, all of it. The man under the words is familiar.

(You would have given anything for records like these, once.)

He sits quietly, unmoving until Jarod comes. The time passes achingly slowly, but this is a battle he's determined to win.

"You lied."

Jarod's wearing white again. His gloved hand strokes down Lyle's jaw with an absent touch. The leather is soft on his skin and then Jarod's touch is firm on his chin, forcing Lyle's gaze from the grey wall.

"I didn't lie." He doesn't sound angry, just a little bit sad, as if he's disappointed in _Lyle. _

"It's your own _father._"

Jarod pulls on Lyle's chin again, making sure Lyle's eyes are on him. His voice is just above a whisper. "Are you trying to tell me, Lyle, that my father as head rat hasn't had people killed? Children haven't been tortured, that the Triumvirate didn't try to punish him before he escaped?"

All the best lies have a grain of truth…

"You still lied."

Jarod traces the edges of Lyle's mouth with his tongue. "I never lie to you," he says. His teeth pull slightly against Lyle's bottom lip, not sharp enough to sting, yet. "Except when I do."

Lyle's leaning in when Jarod leans out. "I'm not lying now."

_Except maybe I am, _Lyle finishes for him, and pushes the file away.

---

_The fact is you only know what the Centre wants you to know._

_--- _

Today the walls are decorated not with words but pictures. A little girl smiles in each frame, endlessly happy, endlessly smiling, and endlessly lost.

"You've got to _think, _Lyle. Where would he go?"

"I don't know!"

"Come on, what would he do?"

"I don't know!"

"You do! You've known them, Lyle. Ordinary people who you'd never even give a second glance, but they're the ones who do it. What would an ordinary man who kidnapped a young girl do?"

"I don't…"

A sigh. "This isn't about The Centre, Lyle. This is about Abigail. 11 years old and still has a teddy bear called Rufus. Weren't you all about saving innocent young girls?"

"I can't…"

Jarod's body is warm pressed up against his back. In the darkness of the room it's all Lyle can feel, see. His breath tickles the back of his neck when he exhales and Lyle shivers. "He took her from Blue Cove Junior High. Guess who else has a daughter that goes there? Little Debbie Broots was in that playground too and maybe if she were blonde she wouldn't be safe at home with her daddy. Tell me where he'd take her, somewhere they'd never think to look."

He can feel Jarod's breath on his neck and the sensation makes it easier – just follow the sensation, he remembers Sydney saying. What would he feel—

_Her little breaths frantic, her heart beating wildly beneath his hand, like a little captured bird. She'd stopped screaming hours ago, a growing bruise on her hip evidence of how he shut her up. Now she's too petrified to move, and that's just the way he wants her – like an animal frozen before the light of something it knows is bigger than itself. The knife glints in the light. _

-- what he would want.

"The school," Lyle breathes, and hopes she's still breathing too. "He's taken her back to the school."

"Very good, Lyle," Jarod says, and skims his hand down Lyle's chest.

---

_Good morning class, you can just call me Lyle._

_--- _

The files on his desk are never the same twice, now. Tax returns are gone, replaced with medicine and missing children. There are murders and unsolved mysteries.

"How long would one of these have taken you on the outside?" Jarod laughs. "You're saving more lives in here."

Lyle licks the tattoo on Jarod's bicep, tracing the edges of the snake until it coils in on itself. He thinks of symbols as Jarod's words become something else. Lyle speaks Cambodian, knows their images and iconography. He wishes he didn't – he wishes for ignorance and idiocy, for a simple life and – and oh _God _for Jarod to do that again.

_Stop, _he tries to whisper but his body doesn't obey, _stop before you turn me into you…_

…_and it stops mattering to me._

_--- _

_How many people died because of what I thought up?_

_--- _

He works it out statistically. Hours blur into days and once again the passage of time becomes unimportant. He works it all out - benefits of medicine, people saved, utility gained for mysteries solved, trickle down effect from local industry. The equation is huge; it covers his walls from near top to bottom, following a pattern few could discern, his equations beyond the ability of all but the best of the best.

He's solving for X. Sometimes X means utility and sometimes it means guilt.

Jarod pushes him up against the wall on the third day (week?) and smudges the graphite until it becomes a meaningless smear of five types of brackets, letters and numbers.

"I was solving for world peace," Lyle protests, but shifts to accommodate Jarod's knee anyway. He has a number – it's not 42 – but somewhere along the way it became meaningless, secondary to this.

"But then you'd have nothing to do," Jarod says, and Lyle shivers again.

---

_You shouldn't have wasted your time helping the downtrodden  
_

_I haven't wasted my freedom_

_--- _

On the screen Sydney and Broots huddle around a small monitor, looking harassed and tired. There are deep lines in Sydney's face, ones he does not remember being there before.

"What are they doing?"

Jarod smiles. Touches the back of Lyle's neck as he only does when they're alone in this room. "They're looking for you."

He wonders how they can lose something that never moves. "Why?"

"Because they don't know you're here." A graze of teeth against his neck. A hand sliding down his torso while Jarod's voice rumbles in his ear. "They don't want me with you."

Incomprehensible, unthinkable, nauseating. Alone in his grey room without flesh and skin, without words or work. Again.

He feels the laptop pressed forward against him. "Make it so they never find us."

---

_Tell Broots I discovered RadioShack._

_--- _

Jarod has a plan for the Centre. It's ambitious, clever and occasionally dumb, just like Jarod. But Lyle can fix that. He can make it work – a viable plan where money doesn't equal power and power doesn't equal exploitation.

"The Triumvirate does nothing," Jarod explains. "I have real plansfor this place. It will be _our _vision, Lyle. I told you once we could do anything together, and we can."

Lyle spares it a thought – with him at Jarod's side he could change things. Without Mr Charles and his board of directors, without Raines and his SL-27, without the Triumvirate ruling from afar. It would never be a charity institute but the advances the Centre had could push technology in all areas forward by decades. Billions of dollars in possible revenue wasted in the pursuit of what? Power. Lyle could show Jarod what real power was.

The DSA technology alone…

But first there's something he has to know, something not on the mainframe or in any of the files he has been given. Jarod never trusted computers, Lyle thinks slightly bitterly. He'll fix that too.

"I need to know something, Jarod."

His voice is shaking. He takes a breath, two, and Jarod regards him with interest. His hand moves lightly against the back of Lyle's neck and it helps, though Lyle's not sure why.

"My family," his voice breaks, again, on the second word.

"Are safe," Jarod assures him. "I've got everything I want."

And then it's all so easy.

---

_You make the rules._

_That's just the way I like it._

_--- _

There are hundreds of cameras in the Centre and they are Lyle's eyes and ears. Secure in his little grey room he is the beating heart of the Centre. Jarod's heart, he imagines, because Jarod runs the Centre like it's his only child and favourite play thing all at once.

Lyle reads lips and watches eyes - spying on secret meetings and watching them plot and conspire against Jarod. Lyle watches them all, taking down their names, memorizing their faces.

One by one they no longer appear on the monitors, but Lyle doesn't spare much thought about that.

Jarod comes to him with drying red on his suit, and warm casings in his hand. He presents them as Lyle imagines one would present flowers and chocolates to a lover. He lays them out one by one on the cold metal desk, and Lyle doesn't flinch at all with the _clink _they make of metal upon metal. There are fourteen in total. "I told them I was there for you," Jarod says, his voice low and quiet. "They begged for your forgiveness."

"I would have given it," Lyle says, wondering if it's true.

"You would," Jarod agrees. With a finger he tips over one of the casings but they do not fall like dominos. They scatter, rolling off the table and onto the floor like he imagines the people they shot did when they tried to escape. Some reach Lyle's feet.

Jarod follows the casing's path and stands in front of Lyle. He looks elated, and Lyle's not sure if it's because of how much closer this brings them, or the blood drying on his clothes. "I killed Raines," Jarod says, as anyone else would say _I love you_. "He's actually dead this time. I made sure."

Lyle's not sure what to say to that, so he wonders how many of the casings were for Raines. "Did he ask for forgiveness too?" He means for his tone to be light, but the words come out dark and serious.

Jarod smiles. "He was praying."

"_Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;  
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven;  
And so am I revenged. That would be scann'd:  
A villain kills my father; and for that,  
I, his sole son, do this same villain send  
To heaven.  
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge_," Lyle recites quietly. "Hamlet. Act three, scene three."

Jarod traces his thumb across Lyle's lip, dismissing the words with touch. "There's no heaven that would take him," he murmurs.

"What's next?" Lyle asks.

"We need to find my father." Lyle stares at the casing, waiting. Old war saying: there's a bullet out there with your name on it. He wonders if Mr Charles' bullet is in Jarod's clip.

"Bridgette's with him and if she goes into labour she'll bleed to death." As if that's any sort of excuse.

He pretends; he's so good at that. "And this child is important."

Jarod kisses him. It's a rebuke. "Yes."

"It's not yours."

Jarod laughs, a genuinely amused sound. Lyle likes the sound when the cause of Jarod's amusement isn't death or pain. He looks up from the casings and at Jarod, looking beyond the blood stains on his suit, for once.

"No. Where would they go?"

It's easy, so very easy. Jarod should have figured it out, and maybe he would have given enough time. But he didn't and couldn't. Jarod's been relying on Lyle more and more. Maybe one day they'll even trust each other.

"Emily's," he says simply.

---

_What do you want?_

_Isn't it obvious? I want everything._

_--- _

He knows the exact time she arrives. People spread like ripples on a pond, trying to escape from the epicentre. It's the work of a few keystrokes to slow her elevator down, a few more to warn Jarod and dispatch Sweepers for safety. He doesn't even glance at her image, just types keystroke after keystroke, making sure nothing can go wrong. They've planned for this.

There is one camera in Jarod's office; one Jarod had put there himself. The feed goes direct to Lyle's room and only Lyle's room.

The doors hiss softly when she shoves them in, and Lyle can hear her yelling before she even appears in the line of the camera.

"There are few things I thought you incapable of, but this has to be one of them."

He hasn't seen her since … since she collapsed into his arms with a bullet in her back. Emily holds herself stiffly, with muscles that don't quite do her bidding. Physiotherapy probably, something she would hate. Lyle's been waiting for her since he got access to the feeds, but she's never even been to her new office. Sometimes Lyle taps Sydney's phone and hears him telling her of the changes Jarod's made, how Sydney's not sure if Emily's on Jarod's blacklist. He wishes Sydney could understand.

"Your own father, or did that not even enter the equation? You're a sick man, Jarod."

Jarod tries to say something, but she holds up a hand to stop him. The door swishes open again and Lyle knows the Sweepers have arrived. They come into frame and each put an arm on her elbow. On the surface it looked courteous, but Lyle knows they won't hesitate to break her arm if she tries to go for a gun. Lyle chose these men himself.

"The world is changing, sis," Jarod says. "Mr Raines is gone, Mr Charles is gone. Lyle's," he pauses for effect, "God only knows where." Lyle almost smiles.

She tries to yank her arms free, and succeeds in elbowing one of them in the gut. "I'm going to find him," she hisses. Lyle's not sure if she's talking about her father or himself. Maybe even both.

"If you're looking for our father then do try a little wooden box, right next to mom. I do believe those were his wishes…"

Lyle, later, has to re-watch what happens twice before he sees everything that happens. Emily turns, as if to leave, and in the moment where the Sweepers let her go she kicks one in the groin and elbows the other in the larynx. She breaks one's nose with her elbow as he goes down, and kicks the other in the head when he finally hits the carpet. Behind her, Jarod's opening the second draw in his desk, trying to pull his gun, but she's quicker. At the last moment Jarod dives aside and the window behind his desk erupts in a shower of glass. She fires another round blind into the desk, estimating Jarod's position.

From the moment she turned Lyle was out of his chair and running. The door opens to his touch and there's no guard. He's on SL-5 the elevator tells him. He punches the number for Jarod's floor and then yanks open the panel to cross a few wires. The elevator, now sans three safety settings and instructions to visit other floors, still gets there too slowly. The doors open with a cheery chime but Lyle's already out and running. He takes a gun from a Sweeper and goes in.

Jarod's on the floor in the middle of the room, bleeding. The blood has soaked through his shirt and the floor. He looks scared, eyes only on the barrel of the gun pointed right between his eyes. Emily stands a few feet away at a safe distance, her finger curled almost gently around the trigger, but turns ever so slightly at the sound of his entry.

"Lyle," she says incredulously, before he shoots her right in the heart.

---

_Life's a gift._

_--- _

The bullet entered through Jarod's shoulder, taking only minor surgery to correct – which Lyle does himself, because Centre doctors are a special kind of evil – and Lyle's hands don't shake at all, even when he's closing the last suture. The bandages don't cover the tattoo on his forearm, leaving it exposed to the world.

Lyle sits by his bedside afterwards and tells Jarod all the muscles damaged and the course of the procedure while he sleeps off the anaesthesia. The bandages are scratchy under Lyle's fingers when he traces the threads, circling over the wound. His eyes never leave the tattoo. (Ouroboros, from Ancient Egypt, circa 1600 B.C.E., the Wheel of Time, nothing to do with Cambodia. Nothing to do with those girls…) He traces it over with a finger, as he has many times before. (Represents the cyclical nature of things, eternal return.) The feeling is no different; the skin just as soft, but suddenly a bedside vigilance seems wrong, all of this seems wrong.

(It's always been wrong. Except -- no, just think.)

He goes back to his room. It's quiet but for the low buzz of the laptop and his own shallow breathing. He switches the video player on and watches himself kill her (no hesitation, no hesitation at all) over and over. When I feel something I'll stop, he tells himself. The video loops until he knows every motion she made as she fell, but all he feels is numb.

He wonders what would have happened if he'd shot Jarod instead. (How many would you have avenged, Lyle?)

Freedom. Simple as that. Maybe.

But then he thinks of his unlocked door and the elevators that open for him. Freedom isn't black and white anymore. _("I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.")_

Maybe it never was. Maybe he was a fool to think he could ever leave the grey of his room.

Lyle wonders if he'll spend his life looking for colour.

---

_Are you a doctor?  
_

_I am today._

_--- _

Jarod wakes slowly, as if pushing through a mountain of cotton wool. The bed beneath him is stiff and unfamiliar, but this doesn't worry him. His shoulder aches mercilessly, and he fumbles with still closed eyes for the call button. They're being stingy on morphine. Bastards. Lyle probably saw to it, probably going to babble about medical nonsense. With a thud his arm hits the wall so he tries the other side but connects with only air. Confused, he opens his eyes.

The room is small, the walls a dull grey. The same grey as his clothing and dressing. The only sign of colour is a bloody smudge on one wall, long since faded to brown.

Even with the words erased, he knows exactly where he is.

His legs nearly collapse under him when he tries to rush for the door, but he manages. There's no locking mechanism on this side, just like there never was. "No," he yells in frustration.

Lyle arrives later. How much later he's not certain - the passage of time goes unmarked by anything but the throb in his shoulder and the nausea in his stomach.

Lyle's wearing a white suit and an unfamiliar smirk. He regards the room with disdain and calmly sits down next to Jarod on the bed, as if he's in no danger at all.

He leans in, invading Jarod's personal space. "No one knows you're down here," Lyle whispers, his voice silky and dangerous. "And no one will until you give me what I want."

Jarod's throat is sore from the tube they shoved down his throat. That's why his voice is hoarse and nearly breaks, that's the only reason. "What do you want?"

Lyle leans in further, grazing his teeth against Jarod's pulse, just harsh enough to hurt.

"My life back."

**End.**_ (Karma, ain't it a bitch?)_

Key:  
Lyle as Jarod  
Emily as Miss Parker  
Major Charles as Mr Parker  
Margaret as Catherine

Characters that haven't changed:Sydney  
Bridgette  
Broots

Tremendous thanks go to everyone who had to listen to me babbling, especially ICD because without her it probably would be half as long and twice as crap. Thanks to Stickmarionette for the beta.

Please let me know what you think.


End file.
